Cat With An Emerald Eye

Chapter 20

Second Sight

While Miss Temple Barr and Miss Electra Lark have scampered off to the psychic fair, I remain at home, trying to catch up on my catnaps.

That late-night lalapalooza at the Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead certainly gave me plenty to dream about. I have not seen such a stellar lineup of spooks since I accidentally stumbled into the wax museum over on Harmon.

Frankly, I cannot make head or tail of what was real and what was not that night, and I am not used to being in the dark about such matters. Perhaps I have made a mistake in not accompanying my roommate and her landlady to the Oasis, but I do my better thinking with plenty of sleep. Between these two females and the Sacred Cat of Karma upstairs, I have barely been able to slit an eye shut.

So I drowse, but by evening I awaken to a familiar assault: getting the psychic saltshaker on the tail, so to speak. I lurch groggily upright, eyeing the ceiling. I know the familiar who is pulling my plume.

"All right," I tell it. "I am not up to another scaling of the Sacred Pyramid. This time Midnight Louie does not go to the mountain; the mountain slides down to his level. Get it?"

I wait for all heaven to break loose, but the ceiling is silent and still. No disgruntled gobs of plaster come at me like spitballs, no conjured enforcers, like tarantula spiders, rain down on my rebellious head.

Something out of the ordinary does occur, though. A spark flashes in the middle of the bedroom television screen, and I have not hit the remote control, not even in rolling over to get up. No picture fills the dark space, only the original spark, which bounces around like one of my favorite toys, a Ping-Pong ball. In fact, I am about to rush the TV screen for a game of cat and mouse when a voice begins broadcasting in my head.

My first suspicion is aliens taking over the airways, but the tone of the voice convinces me it is just Karma blowing the usual hot air. Her actual words do not bear repeating (that is to say, I cannot bear repeating them to any interested parties), but the upshot of her bulletin is that a second seance will soon be in progress at the haunted house and I should attend.

This piece of intelligence perks up my ears and winds up my tail. A second seance? Will Miss Temple be angry to miss such a landmark event! Although I hate to owe Karma for anything, I tip my invisible fedora in her direction before making my way out.

How, you may ask, is Midnight Louie going to leave the Circle Ritz with the bathroom window still closed tighter than a cashier's till? Elementary. I will repeat myself and slip out the same French door that Karma's little out-of-body light beam jimmied open not long before. It never bothers me to accept the aid of a lesser light. I have proven myself to be a supreme escape artist many a time before this. No doubt that is why Houdini waited until last to show up at the previous seance. He must have become tired of always having to prove he can still do it.

In fact, I am beginning to adopt that attitude myself when it comes to my love life.

Holy Havana brown, but, baby, it is cold outside! I hate these cooler Nevada nights, and immediately wish I was back on Miss Temple's bed watching a good basketball game.

But I know that the best antidote to a dose of below-the-belt temperatures is a brisk trot that really gets the old fat rolls swaying. Within half an hour, I am once again outside the disreputable fagade that represents the pinnacle of the human imagination for horror. Frankly, the real horror is its pathetically low profile in the fright department. But I do not take a visit to this second seance lightly; now that certain celebrity ghosts have found a way through to the mortal world, they could make a mass comeback. Just think of all the former performers who could return to torture our airways in the future: Desi Arnaz and Vera Zorina, just to run the gamut of talent from A to Z.

Despite this awful scenario, I do my duty. I find a chink in the building fagade that has been plugged by the wind-blown refuse. I two-step right over Crawford Buchanan's barely recognizable mug and an old Mystifying Max flyer to wriggle into the false floor area where cords and hoses and pipes--oh my!--make like spaghetti. Soon I am shaking dust and dirt from my outer coat and trotting up to the room that rises and sinks like an elevator. I prefer to consider it a mobile but somewhat square crystal ball, given the glass walls surrounding it.

Who will be here? I wonder, not even thinking of the spirit world yet. Who will the mediums be? Or is that the media? There will surely be multimedia here this cold autumn afternoon. I hope one of them is that dame in white. I can tell from thirty feet away that she does not care for my kind, so I could make sure to land on her snow-white lap just to make things interesting I always do love to leave my calling cards where they are not expected, and some shiny black hairs would relieve the dull monotony of her garb.

I bound up the stairs to the room's only doors, which stand slightly ajar.

But the chick et al. have flown the coop. No one is there. I see only the table and its complement of high-backed wooden chairs. No arms clench the carved oak chair arms. No feet fidget under the table. No human heads peek over the high backs.

I am about to get dramatic and draw the curse of catkind down upon Karma (there is nothing like an empty stage to bring out the Olivier in me), when I hear an odd sound and freeze, my every overcoat hair on end. (All right, I have heard an odd sound here before, but then I was not present all by my lonesome.)

The sound is mechanical, a hum from a hundred generators, yet soft and utterly without expression or variance. I remember how UFOs are always seen hovering over power lines. Has no one considered that visitations to successful seances may be aliens trying to communicate? It seems to me that there is quite a connection to be made, and several lucrative books and videotapes in it. I am surprised that Mr. Crawford Buchanan has not dreamed up a show on this for Hot Heads: Humming Hominids from the Hyades Haunt High Desert House not far from Hacienda Hotel for Halloween!

I am ready to execute an about-face when I hear another sound: a tiny chime that sounds odiously familiar. I search the shadows for the source of the noise. The chime tinkles again, just as I spot a form sliding bonelessly from one chair seat to the floor.

"Out, out, damn Spot," I am about to abjure, except that it is not a dog. Nor is it a frog. Nor a tarantula. Not even anything so mouse like as a bat.

"What are you doing here?" I demand.

He sashays over to me, collar chiming like the pendant on one of those cud-chewing bossies'

necks. Behind him comes the hum, even and loud, only now I recognize the source.

"I am assisting Karma tonight," Ingram says, sitting before me to polish the knuckles on his immaculate white gloves. "We need to know who you saw the last time, as we do not wish to call up legions of spirits we will simply have to return to sender, A wearying process for us all, including the returnees."

"How do you know so much about this Spiritualism stuff?" I wonder.

"My dear chap, I am a bookstore mascot. I have spent hours poring over the many tomes on the paranormal that pass through the Thrill n' Quill. Miss Maeveleen Pearl is a great fan of the supernatural."

There he sits in his tattered, tiger-striped sweater that is all baggy at the elbows and hocks, his yellow eyes amber with satisfaction, acting as if he owned the occult.

"I am not sure," I say, "that I wish to sit in on a stance run by a bunch of amateurs."

"Amateurs? Louie, you do not know our pedigrees." He nods over his tacky shoulder.

Ears and whiskers pop out around the chair sides, mostly on tuxedos and spotteds and stripes.

I snort. "And how many Blacks do you have?"

"Two, including you."

"Two?" I think of Midnight Louise and stiffen.

Instead, the face that peeps around another chair is none other than that of my esteemed sire. I am surprised the old man would stick around for some New Age folderol, and tell him so.

"Well, lad," he says, leaping to the floor so as to be better seen and to project his voice further. What an old ham! "Me years on the sea have taught me a respect for Nature in her most whimsical ways. And just last night on this very site, I, too, witnessed a human now dead sending back a shade of itself. It seems to me that with our species' special psychic powers we can concoct an even more impressive parade of ghosts, and I owe my fellows the benefit of my wider travels and insights."

Methinks the sire has absorbed a bit of pomposity while abroad and aboard. Nor does he mention seeing any of the other visiting apparitions, which I find curious.

I see it is too late. I have been lured into this truly hair-brained enterprise. So I leap upon the nearest empty chair and say no more. In moments we assume our positions, moving atop the seance table, facing outward and linking tails. There is nothing our kind cannot accomplish while atop a table. Of course, in this position, the forelimbs do not know what the hind limbs are doing, but that is always the best stance to take in a seance, anyway.

I thrill as that communal hum begins anew. A sympathetic thrum vibrates through the conjoined tails. This is the true purpose of these elegant extremities, and one no human would ever guess just from looking at us waving them back and forth like elegant inkwell appendages.

In fact, if humans were to see us now, they would be so blind as to our true potency that they would simply shout at us to get down from the table.

Now our kind's purr is unique in the animal kingdom. We purr for many reasons: we purr in pleasure and we purr in pain. Consider the purr a variety of audible tranquilizer. So it also affects humans. My kind purrs in kitten birth, and kits purr as they suckle. We purr when we are sleeping, we purr when we are awake. We purr by ourselves and we purr together. We purr when being petted, we purr when being played with. For a few of us, there is one more purr, a secret purr. When we combine our secret purrs, we produce the Purr of Power. And that is simply the amplified amity we feel as furred and purred beings.

In that state, on occasion, we can lure the unusual. The out of the ordinary. The out of this world. Ghosts. Apparitions. Revenants. Spooks.

That is what we see when we peer so intently into a shadowed corner. That is what we hear when we sit atop the grandfather clock and cock our heads at the ceiling. That is what we sense when we run swift and intent to a night-darkened window. The human who comes after us may see, hear, sense nothing. Or the human may see, hear, sense a mouse or a cricket. But many times, we have glimpsed the unseeable, the unsensible.

What do we do with this inestimable gift? Most often, nothing. One of the great pleasures of not being a dominant species is the right to ignore our potential.

But this is a signal occasion. This is a deliberate calling-together, aimed at a specific specter.

I wonder why Karma wishes to participate in the resurrection of the escape artist known as Houdini. I wonder what vision we will raise today. For we will see something. I wonder if it will see us?